How to Uncover Bloggers Who Love Your Brand but They Just Don’t Know it Yet

When starting a social media marketing, influencer relations or content promotion strategy, one of the first places to start is to identify the granular verticals of influential bloggers that will create engagement for your brand.

The “low-hanging-fruits” are people who already like your brand and who have already mentioned you on social and on blogs in the past. They’ve already proven an authentic and genuine brand connection.

One step above that, we’ll call them the “mid-hanging-fruits,” there exists a whole bunch of influencers who love your brand. They just don’t know it yet.

Active Outreach

A good outreach marketing strategy starts and continues to thrive with continual and active “real-time” communication.

One of the four steps when in the process of brands owning their marketing relationships is active outreach. Identifying a niche in which marketers actively recruit influencers to turn in to brand advocates makes up about half an average marketers job!

Tell Them Why the Two of You are Meant to Be

When incorporating active outreach, the main thing to communicate in an initial email is why the two of you are meant to be.

When reaching out to bloggers who you know will love your brand and who would be perfect brand ambassadors, you’re not pitching how cool your brand is. You’re pitching how cool a partnership would be. You’re pitching a future and a happily ever after.

In your email, cite a post topic they write about often or a post that you read that is indicative of why the two of you would be a great fit for a creative partnership.

You can also find information to fill out the whole picture from their “about me” section of the blog.

Embrace Yourself

By diving in to your buyer personas and developing niches of bloggers that your buyers would follow you can locate post topics and post titles on blogs to let you know when someone is a good fit for your brand.

Monitor in Real-Time

Monitoring social media and blog posts in real-time means that marketers know when an earned brand mention comes out. It also means they know the day a post on a niche topic which clues them in to contextual fit has gone out and they can reach out that same day increasing response rates.

To monitor for my own brand mentions I use GroupHigh’s monitor but Talkwalker is another popular one if you don’t have GroupHigh access.

Regardless of the tools, create a strategy that monitors daily for these two components.

Mentions of niche

Mentions of competitors

Communicate Before Proposing

Actively email, tweet, message and communicate with anyone who you would like to partner with before sending a pitch.

Share their content on social

Comment on blog posts

Link to their media

Include them in Facebook groups

Tweet them a question

At The End of the Day…

We all just want authentic relationships. Marketers just want to work with people who love their brand. Bloggers want to be kept in the loop with brands they actually like. And consumers want to hear reviews and recommendations that influencers really stand behind. Marketing has evolved in so many ways with technology but the fundamentals of relationships and how consumers want to hear about products has stayed exactly the same…

Do you have any tips to offer when it comes to identifying and reaching out to bloggers who are a great fit with your brand but they’ve not heard of you?

Kristen Matthews

Kristen is the director of all things digital marketing at GroupHigh. When she isn't reading influencer marketing case studies or digging for awesome data, she can be found at one of Boulder's awesome breweries or hiking in the trees.

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